Perfect skies for Beijing celebrations

The following photos show the gradual and perfectly timed improvement in weather
conditions in the run up to the Chinese
Republic's 60th anniversary on October 1.

Pure luck? Not so, says one of our
Observers in the city. An American expat who lives in Bejing, Roseann Lake gives
her reaction to the event.

Mao Zedong and Mary Poppins seem to have few things in common aside
from
rosy cheeks and the fact that the 60th anniversary of the People's
Republic of China
coincides with Julie Andrews's 74th birthday. As if to
honour both, after days of smog as thick as a mudslide, the winds changed on
the morning of October 1 to reveal impeccably blue Beijing skies.

This
is a series of four photos taken by my flatmate on the three days leading up to
the Chinese National Holiday, and the last one, on the day itself.

Photos: Felix Lettau

“Charmed and petrified as Hu Jintao rolled down to Tiananmen”

The streets
were alive with the sound of military music as 8,000 smartly suited
soldiers marched at a precise 116 steps a minute, and Tiananmen
Square
swelled with enough tanks and missile power to make the North Koreans look
like wet-nurses.

As an American more accustomed to parades of the three-story-tall-Sponge-Bob variety, I watched both charmed and petrified as the average-height
President Hu Jintao rolled down to Tiananmen in a Hongqi, a Chinese-made
limousine with a striking resemblance to a Cold War cruiser. Waving out of
the roof in a slim-fitting gray Mao suit, he solemnly saluted soldiers with
alternating expressions of "Tongzhimen hao" ("Greetings,
comrades")
and "Tongzhimen xinkule" ("Comrades, you've worked so hard!").

Although Chang'an Avenue
looked decidedly majestic flanked with tanks
and soldiers, the only witnesses to the event were the freshly scrubbed
high-rises on either side of the avenue and the snipers dutifully
surveilling the parade from their rooftops. The ordinary Chinese of the People's
Republic were nowhere to be seen, aside from the 30,000 officially invited
guests of the government permitted onto Tiananmen Square.
The first half of the parade displayed the best the Communist Party and
its military assets could offer, including a fleet of stone-faced females
marching in miniskirts and white go-go boots.

According to Evan Osnos of
The New Yorker, these girls were not real soldiers, but a troop of village
officials, teachers, doctors, white-collar workers and mothers united
especially for the occasion. Oops. We won't tell Hu, who cracked his one
and only smile during the parade as they marched by.

Residents of Beijing, blocked from getting anywhere near the event, were
instead encouraged to stay home where they could be dazzled by the
festivities on television and where the aerial views of the square allowed
them to read the huge red-and-white signs formed by thousands of performers
simultaneously flipping large coloured placards. "Do as the party
says,"
flashed one, followed shortly after by, "Socialism is good" and
"Long
live China."

As a westerner living in the capital, I have mixed feelings about the 60th
anniversary. I was
initially vexed to learn that Beijingers couldn't
attend their own country's parade and that all other cities were
forbidden from having their own celebrations because so much security had
been deployed to Beijing that there wasn't enough left to secure against
riots elsewhere. But I quickly remembered that this is China, the
country
that can control its own weather and block Facebook for 1.3 billion
people. Certain things happen here that don't elsewhere, but this
doesn't mean that everything is bad, backwards, or militantly communist.
Most of the time, it just appears that way.

A parade of exactly 60 exuberant floats followed the military,
showcasing China's
advancements in agriculture, aeronautics, athletics,
education, health care, technology and other fields. Kitsch in a Chinese New Year
sort of way and very reminiscent of the Olympic hullabaloo that still
thrives in Beijing,
the celebration ended with thousands of schoolchildren
releasing balloons into the sky.

Of course, a few balloons
haven't made me forget that China is still
governed by a party that occasionally does silly, contradictory, or even
reprehensible things (see Tibet, Xinjiang, Burma and select parts of the
African continent), but any country with big aspirations often does. The
point is, because of and despite its 60 years of communism, China is poised
to surpass Japan
as the world's second largest economy, and who knows what
else.

So bring on the parade, the pandas, the fireworks, and the new subway
line. A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.